This paper is about the representation of science and technology in the service of exploration and discovery through the distinct but overlooked genre of travel writing, engineers’ reports and plans. In his account of his journeys in Northern Scotland, and in his proposed engineering works, Telford worked hard to efface any sense of strain or unfamiliarity about travel on his roads and canals. This contrasts strongly with the accounts of other visitors to this British terra incognita (Rackwitz 2007) who aimed to evoke various gloomy, unsettling or inconvenient aspects of Highland travel. Even though his own extensive journeys were arduous and exploratory, Telford remediated through words and drawn plans a landscape that was shaped around a rational transport infrastructure, creating the bedrock on which Romantic travellers could roll smoothly forward into their encounters with the sublime. And while Telford’s radical landscape sculpting no doubt encouraged the kind of panoramic visuality we might associate with colonial conquest, this paper does not aim to reiterate this familiar position. Instead, it will examine the ways in which Telford as engineer created a narrative for the Highland landscape through his distinct form of literary and visual expression that was interdisciplinary and intertextual. As I argue, his own double publications, in word and image (the Life and Atlas of 1838) interact with other surrounding diverse productions, such as the literary Journal of a tour in the Highlands (Southey 1819), other engineering memoirs and reports, landscape representations and indeed the mass of more recognised travel writings and sensational touristic souvenirs.